A Matter Of Perspective

For Salma Patel, too, the purpose of taking people on tours of the city is to excavate its painful history, not bury it. Her own tour zig-zags across Fietas, a once racially mixed neighborhood west of the city center that was blighted in the 1970s by one of South Africa’s infamous “forced removals,” which took aim at mixed areas of the city by marking them as slums and scattering their residents to distant, segregated peripheries.

Except it’s not the same difference. The big difference is who is doing it and for whose benefit and why it is being done. If the Jews in the media like the whos and the whys, then it’s social justice, if they don’t, it’s evil apartheid.